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What I do not fear to remember is before: my thin blue arms pale shadow face and my mother’s arms a crescent coming close. She would coax me to eat soup, bread soaked in milk. They sent me away, far from Serniki to convalesce on my cousin’s farm.
The cart had high wheels grinding the dry track across the marshes. The pain in my lungs measured the clop of the horse. I lay wrapped in a rug; my mother’s face came part of the way until it faded into the wispy clouds and blue overhead. The wheels and my breath shared the same grinding tune; my body rattled hollow thin as a reed.
What I remember most is after. News comes one sentence at a time. It happened early September (while I watched meadow pipits on the clothes lines stretched between two chestnut trees.) The men of Serniki discovered a huge open pit, hid in the forest or fled to the partisans. (my arms grew fat as butter) More whispers filter through: women and children taken for a walk good clothes, clean hair plaited for best, simply walked into the grave. Face down, circling their children waited for the shot. (my arms now thin as pipit legs) The Rabbi reminded them, it is said, we all die one day, be brave, today is as good a day as any.
Those mountains twist down as far as my eye sees though I see little except her face the color of stirred oatmeal. When she ripped her leg on a rusted plow, I packed the wound with a mash of herbs, yarrow, burdock, goldenseal and offered teas made with mullein and ginseng. At first she was eased.
We started out well, a few tears but mainly laughter. When we stopped the wagons, we all knew our chores but after supper women in sunbonnets sat with our pieces running needle and thread through scraps. We all have favorites, Starflower, Flying Bird Poplar Leaf, Churndasher. I favor Toad in a Puddle.
We swap little fiddles of muslin, dimity, calico, silk. Emily busy with the other children carved slip-whistles from green willow twigs, caught fireflies in jelly glasses; played mumblety-peg, one-old-cat, duck-on-the-rock. Lately each stays with their own, since the Ritter family buried three daughters in a wagon box covered with quilts,
her bridal quilt and a Wild Goose Chase, complete the day before. We think Cholera from a stagnant water pool. They knew only to drink running water but were scammed dry from chasing the chickens to fasten in their coop under the wagon. I’d been busy fastening our cow in a Nine Patch to keep abscesses clean. I were afeared for Emily but she said only riverwater.
When she cut herself, I was making flatbread in a skillet from cornmeal batter and filling up greaselamps. So I cleaned her leg with homespun dyed blue with ragweed galls and packed with the poultice. I hold her beneath the quilt behind the one hanging for the privacy blanket and talk of our new place when we arrive. How we’ll have windows with glass, like Papa
promised and we’ll choose from a bolt of cloth for curtains, no hessian sack. The sky will be blue most every day. We’ll have a kitchen and parlor with separate storeplaces for drygoods and root vegetables, a porch with a swing for Emily and her own patch for growing pansies instead of huckleberries and fleabane. She is nestled deep in the quilt breathing as soft as the sirocco of a horse’s breath.
our wedding car was a hearse a shiny important car with a small white coffin on the back seat
we stayed in the car and stared at the dark rectangle cut into the earth at rows of crosses white in the sun
a family stumbling stiff with grief to that dark deep hole bearing sadness and roses heavier than the coffin the air gathered black with flies and white roses rained into the gaping wound which would be healed by white marble
we left the place ringed with purple blue mountains and bright crosses drove to a smart mahogany office and said “I will” to each other
the words seemed hard like firm round pebbles I held them with the scent of my own white roses
Mary A. Israel was assistant lighthouse keeper at Point Loma, San Diego 1873-1876
She gazed up into the snail curl of stair where shadows had fossilised; light moved to the waltz of the wind her needles were purling patterns of ocean. She was chained into her knitting starved of the company of women longing to dine on small gossip to scallop the edge of their dialogue.
Her bones had stiffened to the beechwood chair two o’clock chill silhouetted her shape her hands looked stunted as her mother’s. She kept the ships company, ebbed on their tide kept her rebellious thoughts as surreptitious as her tomato plants their growing; she shook free her cramped limbs mixed into misty window reflections.
The moon cruised huge with harvest obscured by soft fibrous film. Ships were skeining the rollers tacking between needles of rock. She shuffled her chair in chalky light cast off her shawl of cloud, listened to her needles weaving and the siren stars; she was forever on watch.
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